Chapter 21
Ani
Finding solace in my dreams went as well as anyone would imagine. Not even in my imagination was I spared the grimness of my reality. Waking up multiplies my discomfort and the harsh light filtering into my eyes brings a finality to my plight.
The beady eyes fixed on my cage make me ache for the once-odd, but now precious, blue-green gaze of Szhe’ka. To think I was annoyed at his watchfulness, and now I am stuck with dead seal eyes.
They must have watched me even as I slept, as if slipping away under cover of night would have been effortless. Their gathering would have discouraged any predators, and they clearly chose a good vantage point in the forest.
I shudder and I can tell they like it.
A valium would be far too much to hope for right now. Maybe a stimulant to keep my mind from galloping would be the better fit, but this isn’t really a situation where more clarity would help me cope.
Without either to help, instead my mind rushes, turning to its favorite activity: Self-flagellation and overthinking.
I have led a pathetic life, whispers the ugly voice, and I will have this pathetic death.
Except, isn’t this what I wanted? It’s really becoming clear that despite my situation, I’m finally free of the fame.
Free, I think with a snort. I still don’t know the meaning of that word.
Trapped in a body that is changing. Trapped in a cage. Free of my mother. Free of fame.
This freedom is like melted gold being dropped on my hands in slow drips. Gold is valuable but the pain is scorching.
Now, this freedom, the cooling gold in my hand, won’t mean much in my hands if I’m trapped without escape. But that’s too bleak a thought to tide me over in this tasteless cell. If I’m miserable in real life, I can always use my imagination.
So what should I imagine?
If by some kind of miracle, I manage to escape this bleak fate and return to Earth like this, the first thing I’ll do is give the people who know me a heart attack. My stylist would probably lose his mind seeing my hair.
The Witch probably would have a hard time recognizing me. She pruned me to be the perfect doll after all. How could her perfect doll look like a wild spirit of the mountains? Her perfect garden becoming a hedge of weeds would be the most noteworthy disaster of all time.
My first therapist would probably try to ascribe one mental illness or the other. She’d make bank if she capitalizes off my delusion.
My friends, well… it would be far fetched to say I have any.
Genuine friendship has always been something that has managed to elude me time and time again.
It’s hard to make friends when everyone you’ve ever met is locked in an endless competition with you.
For people who hardly knew me or how much I had suffered to become the perfect doll they saw, they envied me.
They envied the perfect figure I had starved for.
They envied the perfect hair my mother spent time obsessing over, like she was the old crone in Rapunzel.
They envied my voice, my tone, my accent.
They wanted to be perfect and exotic like I was.
They were all clowns participating in a show made to entertain mindless drones.
I too, at some point, envied their freedom.
I envied the secretary that used to work for a model I knew, even though everyone always bullied her for being fat.
I wanted to know how it felt to eat as freely as she did.
She told me she envied me once, and I just scoffed.
I wish I had told her that it wouldn’t matter how you starve yourself.
People still call you fat. I should have told her she was beautiful, because she was.
But, oh, I still listened to their mocking and changed myself. A mindless drone I was, locked in a constant struggle and yearning for a freedom that did not exist.
Despite this, when I was still such a na?ve child, I wished for friends.
I was truly like Rapunzel, locked in a tower and told I was better than the other little girls.
When I was finally let out of the tower and was introduced to others, I thought they would be the same as me, dolls behind a glass panel.
Growing up, while my experience was unique, the people I met were as power thirsty as my mother.
Of all the roles my mother arranged for me as a child, none put me in a position to make better friends.
Realistically, I was more likely to make enemies than friends because everyone wanted to get the lead role.
Locked in the vicious environment of “show biz”, my life became an elaborate movie.
To the press and whatever fans I had, I was an untouchable femme fatale.
To the people that knew me and didn’t pull out the Bitch, I was polite yet distant.
My “friends” always chided me for being so closed off but what they really wanted to know was if I was getting cast frequently and if they could snatch my opportunities before I did.
Compared to the aliens whose expressions I can barely read; humans have always pretended to be open books.
They could smile to your face and stab you in the back.
It was hard to tell who was genuine so I pretended to be friends with them, rather than come face to face with the fact that I was just as rotten as they were.
I cannot stand inside the glass house and throw stones.
You are the Bitch, the voice reminds me.
Am I? Rather than operate as just a clown in a giant circus, if I am to continue playing a role, then maybe I should play the Circus King.
It’s still going to be a circus, and it would be difficult to change that.
The roles that those clowns fought me for were so bad, I find it hard to believe that mother truly thought it was a grand opportunity.
The Circus King or the Bitch, I muse. Which would be better?
All the roles I have ever had were terrible. They were either too na?ve, too stupid or too over-sexualized. God, they really were all terrible writers.
I’ll just have to write my own.
I don’t have much experience with writing though. From what I remember, the writers all said they drew inspiration from who they liked. They must’ve liked a lot of questionable people to make a sixteen-year-old play a femme fatale. Fuck them and their methods.
Who would I be?
If it’s someone I truly like and admire, it would have to be…hmm. What a dilemma. Is there truly someone genuine and kind in the industry? Someone older worth looking up to? Does anyone even check that box?
My eyes wander out of the cage, out past the clearing.
There’s barely any wildlife here given the set up of the hunters.
However, there are some critters moving around and some birds cawing up high in trees.
After spending time in this forest, I wouldn’t say I’m fond of its wildlife, most of which could kill me but there is one person I can think of who would revel in such a situation.
In one of my usual inscrutable leaps of logic, I figure out who I can emulate.
Steve. Crocodile-hunting Steve.
I never got the opportunity to meet the man, but his enthusiasm blew me away.
It’s hard to find someone that is so genuinely proud of what he does that he keeps doing it every day.
He made it a family affair but not so much that his kids despise what he did.
Not like what the Witch did with me… I just know it.
He’s a man worth emulating. Is that my new mask?
I can’t do the Australian accent, though. Should I take my Russian accent back? No, that only works in English and it’s a lazy way to play a role. I should just keep an American accent.
My mind spins out some more on how to make a new mask out of Steve, and it feels more ridiculous the longer I play it out.
You are the Bitch, the ugly voice reminds me.
I shake my head, wincing as my scalp sends shooting pains, followed by a burning itch.
The Bitch doesn’t fit anymore. In the small chance Szhe’ka is still alive, it’s also not what he deserves.
“I want a new normal,” I mutter to myself.
Although is it normal to be this itchy? I’ve itched for hours now and it’s becoming unbearable to even think. It feels like I’m being stabbed by a million needles at the same time.
A loud bang against the cell distracts me, drawing my attention to the small steel tray pushed inside with the same saltless crackers and a bowl of water. Is this their definition of breakfast? I would much rather prefer the fruit I picked with Szhe’ka.
It’s hard to even think of him. Everything tells me he probably bled to death but just a sliver of hope prompts me to believe he somehow survived. He deserves to be rescued more than I do.
I keep scratching my skin, preferring not to eat this “breakfast”. I’m not about to provide content for their sick minds. I know they’re watching me with some kind of camera, even though I haven’t seen much in the way of technology.
My skin has been rubbed raw and I’m sure I look like a crazed person with my hair in shambles from how busy my hands have been. The acid burn that was all along my side is gone, like it never happened, though I don’t think it’s something I will ever forget.
I either healed a life-altering injury while I slept fitfully or it never happened. I feel insane.
My skin feels slightly rougher and almost scaly; the area around my nails is slightly bruised and reddish, as if irritated; and the nails themselves seem to have sharpened somehow. I don’t know what is happening to me. Hopelessness blankets me like a stifling embrace.
Surely it can’t get any worse.
A blob passes the window of my cage and calls to another one, telling him that they would have to move camp soon and my heart starts to beat much faster. I try to take deep breaths and think of anything else but only Szhe’ka’s face and his soothing voice comes to mind.
The songs we shared, both sad and happy, and that time he helped me out of a panic attack by singing.
Tears fall as I realize that he was the first person in a very long time to see me have one and the first person to help me out of it with music, the very thing that traumatized me for all of those years of never being good enough.
My eyes close as a memory surfaces. ‘If your voice had been better,’ said the Witch, ‘then you wouldn’t need to use your cunt.’
I push my mother out of my mind and forcibly claw back the image of Szhe’ka.
I can still see his pretty bright-green eyes and the way they would soften whenever I lashed out at him. I hadn’t realized how much I had come to depend on him and think about him. My shoulders slump with the painful, recurring thought that I might never see him again.
My mind is still distracted when I reach down to scratch at my hand and I immediately know that something’s not right. I look down to see that the skin on the back of my arm is raised and has somehow turned blue and yellow, the same bright colors as Szhe’ka’s, except in a different pattern.
Before I can think, I let out a scared yell and attempt to scratch it off. I must be hallucinating. I have to be. My skin starts to bubble slightly like the inside of a cauldron and darken, where it was a little leathery and raw before.
Now, I watch as it reshapes into the odd structures of raised skin like Szhe’ka, but on a more delicate scale.
Another scream finds its way out of my throat when I look down at my hands; they are darkening with what I can only describe as dark blue talons sprouting where my nails should be. There is blood dripping from my fingertips, and a searing pain running up my arms.
What is happening to me? I can feel the beginnings of a panic attack creeping its way up my spine so I grab my hair tight in preparation for the torment to come.
When my hands come away, there’s a clump of bright blue-green feathers in my grasp, along with a couple strands of my ruby red hair.
The next scream is long and primal.
I find out the hard way that my little steel cell isn’t soundproof because a couple of the hunters come squelching to the window. My captor is the one that opens the door and when he takes one look at me, he shrieks.
“You dried hole. What did you do?”
I don’t know!
I can’t explain what happened. I’m still sputtering when I am dragged out by the collar and made to get on my feet.
“This was not supposed to happen; your metamorphosis was not supposed to go like this,” he screeches at me, his rage reflecting in his vicious predatory eyes.
I want to give a reason to him and to myself, but my mind is blank. I’m guessing whatever is happening to me is supposed to be some kind of change triggered by thinking of the person?
That can’t be. It sounds insane.
His black eyes glint with malice; he seems to have grown in size again.
The other ones who had followed him to my cage back away slowly, obviously as terrified of his rage as I am. He towers over all of them now by almost a foot, bringing a terrifying realization that this species’ size changes with their emotions.
I can’t do much but try to crawl backward away from him as he advances, a flipper raised to hit me.
“Come with me, whore. I—what was that?”
I heard it too—the soft snap of a branch in the bushes not too far from us.
The camp is silent and when I look around, all of the other hunters are a little distance away and not paying much attention to us but the one beside me has his eyes glued to the forest, waiting for the slightest sound or movement.
In the same direction the sound came from, a flash of brown and white moves in the greenery and the hunter raises his gun to shoot.
I don’t know what comes over me or how I gather the courage or even the strength, but I throw myself toward the hunter and knock his gun away from him so that he misses the shot.
I fall to my back and before I can stand up, I hear him bark angrily from above me, his eyes even more menacing than I’m used to.
“Will you ever learn to obey?!”